This depends on whether you are shooting outdoors or in a studio, if you shoot outdoors and your work depends on a fast workflow process (Sports, Fashion, On Site shoot for a client) you need to check fast whether you got it right. Plus the added value if something is not quite right you got both formats with you, if you need to share your photos fast with your client, your model or someone else and working on a tight time frame you give them the JPEG’s and use the RAW’s latter on in the post-production (development) process.

And then when I had a little bit more time I used RAW for the post-processing:

Even do the end result was a JPEG image, there are some small diferences and the reachnes of detail remains in the images that ware made from the RAW format. This is due to the nature of the RAW format and the way it captures the image.

One more added comfort is that if you go for the described HDR process or the photo-stitching process (in my previous blog) you already have one JPEG to start with and only need to create from RAW just a couple more to merge them in Photoshop® or any other program to create HDR image. If you need to produce a large panorama or other composite image for faster workflow and lesser CPU and RAM exploitation use JPEG’s for faster results (and in most of the time JPEG’s will be enough for a final result).

I hope this will be enough convincing for anyone at least to think when to shoot just RAW and when both RAW + JPEG.